As you become more security conscious, you might ask yourself: what information does Amazon have about me? Let’s take a look.
Kinds of information that are available
Amazon is more than just a large retail website. It is also a provider of e-book content through the Kindle environment. Amazon has a music service, a video service and a photo storage service. And if those weren’t enough, there is also the family of Alexa/Echo devices. When you start to add it up, there are many kinds of information at play.
- Contact information
- Addresses for billing and shipping
- Payment information
- Items ordered
- Items looked at
- Many more pieces of information about orders.
- Kindle devices
- Kindle books read, including purchases and library books
- Music
- Video
- Photos
- Fire TV
- Alexa/Echo devices
Now that you understand what is involved, let’s see how to access it.
How to get a copy of the information Amazon has about you
Log into your Amazon account on your favorite browser.
Information about items you have purchased is in your Account information. To reach that, you will click on your name in the upper right corner. Then click Your Orders.
Other types of information that Amazon has collected are a little more difficult to find.
Use this link to get to the Amazon page about your personal data. Alternately, you can go to the Help section and search for Security and Privacy and the link will be there.
From this page, you can manage your information, or you can request a copy of it.
Here are your choices under Manage Your Personal Information. This includes data that you don’t need to specifically request, which is always available to you.
Here are your choices under Request Your Personal Information.
When you click on Request My Data, you will be given a list of individual pieces of data you can request, or you can request all of it at once. Amazon will notify you that it might take up to a month to compile the information. They will send you an email when that information is ready for you.
In our example, this request returned a 10 page list of the data that we could download. Each type of data was in a separate document. Here is the beginning of that list. If you look at the size of these files, you will see that most of them are quite small, they don’t have much data in them. These files in the range of a few KB or even measured in bytes, will be about the size of a single page of text.
The actual data
Here is a piece of one such document. In this case, it is tracking the font size changes on a Kindle device. This tracking occurs when a Kindle user changes the font size of the book they are reading. Who knew that was being tracked?
There is a lot of personal data involved, although not all of it is sensitive. We think it might be worth your time to check it out and see what you think.
If you would like help with this process, just call or email and we’ll be happy to assist you! If you have specific questions, or if our terminology isn’t clear, please use our contact form to send us a message. Thank you!